I was reading David Farland's Kick in the Pants a couple of weeks ago and he recommended reading L. Ron Hubbard's "The Manuscript Factory." I found a version online, and I have to say I really enjoyed it. I guess I just like the nuts and bolts approach to success as a science fiction writer much more than the artsy take so many seem to restrict it to (and are in turn restricted by).
In any case, one of Hubbard's recommendations was that your stories always have at least 5 markets they would appeal to. So how do you accomplish that? One way would be to just assume that any of the markets on the SFWA pro list would be a potential market for whatever speculative fiction you happen to write, but I've found myself having a hard time drilling down to which market on the list would be the best fit for a particular story. It's not a long list, but every market has its own emphases/flavors, and many of them spell out exactly what they're looking for on their submissions pages.
So with that in mind, I've decided to start a short series of entries tagged MarketWants where I'll just break down the markets by what kinds of stories or what elements in the stories the markets say they want. It won't be based on any "insider knowledge" or anything, just what the markets openly profess on their websites that they are looking for. This is mostly just to help me personally to better focus my stories on the areas that are most marketable, but hopefully others will find the information useful as well.
I of course am curious to see what story attributes end up at the top of the list.
